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A few days ago, we had S & C over for dinner, which was the first time I've gotten to have any in-depth conversations with them. Like me, C is an independent woman who knows her own mind and isn't afraid to say what she's thinking (some people prefer the phrase "stubborn bitch", and I'm comfortable with that term too), and at one point the topic turned to how often that trait has led to us getting fired. We even talked a bit about how well or badly those firings were handled.
As is typical for me, the thought rolled around in my head for a few days, and I've realized that the people who have benefited the most from my repeated firings are the people who work for me. Over the years, I've learned something from every one of my many bosses, even the very bad ones.
The first time I was fired, it was my first Real Job, the one that didn't involve minimum wage and required me to have actual skills and stuff. However, I (along with one other college student) was still treated like a minimum-wage lackey. One night, the consultant who sometimes did work for the company made a major change, and then sent in an email about it two hours later-- after I'd spent two hours answering irate customer phone calls (and two hours of going "WTF?" and undoing a lot of his changes to make things work). I fired off a scathing email telling him exactly what I thought about his changes and the resulting mess. Turns out that he was a friend of the CEO, who fired me the next day. To this day, though, I stand by my opinion of the situation.
From that job and firing, I learned what happens when you favor one employee's opinion over another's solely because of who the opinion came from-- I was not overly upset about being fired, but I was pissed about being treated like I knew nothing. I also learned the value of communication, as it's entirely possible that there was a really good reason for the changes the consultant made-- but since he didn't explain any of the reasons, nor did he give anyone any warning ahead of time, it turned into a bunch of customers who couldn't use their service. I try really hard not to make changes that make life more difficult for others, and when I absolutely have to, I make sure they understand what I'm trying to accomplish. Often, I just tell my employees what it is I want to accomplish, and then I sit back and let them suggest ways to do it. They have brains and skills. Sometimes they find flaws in the system that I'm proposing and collectively we make the system even more time-consuming for them, but they're okay with it because they know it's the best solution available. Sometimes they spot something I missed and they suggest something equally workable and infinitely easier. Either way, it's a win for me.
The second job I got fired from was the one right after that. Things were going swimmingly for the first four months, until my immediate boss finally burned out. That's when things went haywire, because the CEO was a drug addict, and the new manager for my department had no idea what we did and covered his incompetence with an iron fist. Because he had no idea what was appropriate to our jobs, he assigned tasks to the first person he saw, and all tasks had equal priority ("fix the broken server", "answer customer calls" and "vacuum the Network Operations Center" were all of equal importance in his mind). This meant that the day shift was absolutely swamped, while the night shift was bored silly, because the manager went home before the night shift came in. At one point we all agreed to have a meeting at shift-change, and we divvied up all the tasks in a more sensible manner, so that every single task, even vacuuming the NOC every day, would get done efficiently. The manager threatened to fire the lot of us if we ever had a meeting without him again. Eventually I got fired for subscribing to a mailing list with my personal email account (the mailing list was [the company]sucks@whateverhostitwas.com; I subscribed because our customers were so pissed off that they wouldn't even tell us what was wrong anymore, they just ranted on another mailing list, which eventually asked them to take it elsewhere. And I used my personal account because I didn't want it to appear that an employee of the company agreed with them. My boss and the CEO were both aware that I responded to and fixed complaints on the main mailing list, and approved of that, but when everything moved off to another list, suddenly it was treason to follow). By the way, a few weeks later, it was company policy that ALL employees had to be subscribed to that list.
Mostly I learned to avoid companies run by drug addicts from this experience. But I also learned to take a deep breath and a step back and at least ask what the hell someone was thinking before blowing up at them. Often, people have good intentions that get misinterpreted (or go the wrong way entirely), and just giving them a chance to explain what was going through their heads can be enough to resolve the situation peacefully. I also learned how to explain my own thought processes better, because sometimes I'm the one with the good intentions and poor follow-through. (When it comes to poor follow-through, baby, I'm the master!)
Job #3 I quit rather than got fired from, but I quit largely because I had had it with my boss. In March, I had asked for the weekend of the 4th of July off, explaining that not only was it my birthday weekend but that I had been invited up to Traverse City with a group, and hotel reservations had to be made. I was granted the time off, reservations were made, deposits were put down, etc. In a weekly staff meeting a few weeks before the trip, I reminded everyone that I still needed someone to take my Sunday shift, as it was a 24/7 center and I was the only one there on Sunday. My boss dressed me down in the meeting, saying that I was "inflexible" about my schedule. I waited until after the meeting and called John to ask how upset he would be if I quit, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon drafting my resignation letter, in which I detailed EVERY SINGLE SHIFT I had taken for others-- including working three days of the just-past Memorial Day weekend: I took a Friday shift (my day off, my schedule was Sun - Thurs), my own Sunday shift, and a 12-hour shift on Monday because only the midnight guy and I were even willing to consider coming in, so we split the day into a midnight-noon shift and a noon-midnight shift. I dropped my resignation off on my boss's desk as I left that day. He was actually surprised by it, because he was so out of touch with his employees that he had no idea that anyone ever had any beef with him at all.
Our time-off policy comes straight from my hatred of that job. I have yet to meet anyone who loves their job so much that they willingly give up their life outside of the job and enjoy doing so (I've met more than a few people who love the money from their job so much that they've allowed themselves to be forced into giving up their social life, which is not at all the same). Our policy stems from my inherent belief that a job should not take over your life. As long as there is at least some notice given (even "Hey, I won't be in tomorrow"... the general rule of thumb is "give at least as much notice as the time off will be", so that a two-week vacation should include two weeks of knowing about it beforehand) and the job responsibilities get done, I don't care about time off. The vacation policy is "don't make me count how many days you've taken", which pretty much means "try not to take two-week vacations two months in a row". If you'd rather work from home and there's no reason why you can't get as much done there as you get done in the office-- fine. Work from home. I like people to show up once a week so that I can have a staff meeting, but I really only manage to have them now and then, and if you miss one, *shrug*. Oh well. There will be another. (I do demand that people be available via IM or email if they're working from home, but that's about it.)
The fourth job I got fired from, I got fired largely because there was strife between the owners. One of them liked me a lot, and therefore the other desperately wanted to get rid of me. From this firing, I learned how not to dick around with an employee, because it was easily the worst firing I've ever had-- to the point that by the end of it I was so fed up that I said "Look, can I just go now?" First thing in the morning, I got a call from the owner that liked me, who sounded upset and said "I need to see you, but I'm busy right now, can you come up to my office in an hour?" Yeah, because THAT'S not going to set me on edge for the hour while I'm waiting. Sure thing. I had a pretty good idea of what was up, too. I killed time for an hour and then trotted up to his office, whereupon he told me that I was being let go, but that I could "work through the end of the week." Now, the idea of that is laughable to begin with, because even if I was inclined to do much in the way of useful work for the rest of the week, my ability to do so depended on having root passwords, and I knew damned well they would be changed before the hour was out. The person I worked with was an old friend of mine, and we went out to lunch after I got back down to the server room, during which he told me that the root passwords were changed while I was in my boss's office, because he knew that I was being fired-- the owners had offered him the management position he wanted if he would do the firing (he turned them down because he didn't think he could do it, and probably didn't agree with the reasons behind it to begin with-- I told him he should've done it anyway, as he probably would have done a better job of it, and at least one of us would get something out of it). Since they knew that we had been friends for years, I consider this particularly low of them. After we got back, I got a call from the HR manager, asking me to come up "in 45 minutes". Riiiiiiiiiight. She tried to get me to sign a letter saying that I was a "temporary" employee (meaning "not eligible for unemployment"), and then told me that the owner was wrong (!) about my being able to work through the end of the week, but that I could work through the end of the day. By this point, I was so pissed about the way everything had been handled, I snapped at her that I had carpet installers coming the next day (which was true) and that I'd just as soon go home right then so that I could prepare the room for them instead of wasting my time there.
The lesson in that? If you've decided to get rid of someone, just do it. Don't screw around, and don't string them along. Don't use it as political leverage against someone else, either, because even then I was far more annoyed at the way my friend/co-worker was treated than the way I was (I was *used* to being fired by that point; he wasn't used to being used as a pawn).
Job #4 was also the firing in which I stopped tolerating the idea that owners or executives inherently had more rights than other employees. I've always liked the idea of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself, and I highly doubt that any of the people involved in that clusterfuck would have liked to be on the other side of the table. Nowadays I extend that idea to company policy as well-- we have a very relaxed dress code in part because I want to be able to wear shorts and T-shirts to work all the time. My rule is that my employees are allowed to do anything that I'm allowed to do. (Which is another reason for a lax time-off policy, because I'm in favor of the "I don't want to come in today" days off too.) Things that aren't reasonable to have everyone doing are still on an open-book policy, though-- they might not be allowed to write checks, but if any one of them wishes to see the accounting and get a feel for how we spend our money, I'm fine with showing them where every single penny goes and why it goes there, and that includes showing them my salary and John's.
As is typical for me, the thought rolled around in my head for a few days, and I've realized that the people who have benefited the most from my repeated firings are the people who work for me. Over the years, I've learned something from every one of my many bosses, even the very bad ones.
The first time I was fired, it was my first Real Job, the one that didn't involve minimum wage and required me to have actual skills and stuff. However, I (along with one other college student) was still treated like a minimum-wage lackey. One night, the consultant who sometimes did work for the company made a major change, and then sent in an email about it two hours later-- after I'd spent two hours answering irate customer phone calls (and two hours of going "WTF?" and undoing a lot of his changes to make things work). I fired off a scathing email telling him exactly what I thought about his changes and the resulting mess. Turns out that he was a friend of the CEO, who fired me the next day. To this day, though, I stand by my opinion of the situation.
From that job and firing, I learned what happens when you favor one employee's opinion over another's solely because of who the opinion came from-- I was not overly upset about being fired, but I was pissed about being treated like I knew nothing. I also learned the value of communication, as it's entirely possible that there was a really good reason for the changes the consultant made-- but since he didn't explain any of the reasons, nor did he give anyone any warning ahead of time, it turned into a bunch of customers who couldn't use their service. I try really hard not to make changes that make life more difficult for others, and when I absolutely have to, I make sure they understand what I'm trying to accomplish. Often, I just tell my employees what it is I want to accomplish, and then I sit back and let them suggest ways to do it. They have brains and skills. Sometimes they find flaws in the system that I'm proposing and collectively we make the system even more time-consuming for them, but they're okay with it because they know it's the best solution available. Sometimes they spot something I missed and they suggest something equally workable and infinitely easier. Either way, it's a win for me.
The second job I got fired from was the one right after that. Things were going swimmingly for the first four months, until my immediate boss finally burned out. That's when things went haywire, because the CEO was a drug addict, and the new manager for my department had no idea what we did and covered his incompetence with an iron fist. Because he had no idea what was appropriate to our jobs, he assigned tasks to the first person he saw, and all tasks had equal priority ("fix the broken server", "answer customer calls" and "vacuum the Network Operations Center" were all of equal importance in his mind). This meant that the day shift was absolutely swamped, while the night shift was bored silly, because the manager went home before the night shift came in. At one point we all agreed to have a meeting at shift-change, and we divvied up all the tasks in a more sensible manner, so that every single task, even vacuuming the NOC every day, would get done efficiently. The manager threatened to fire the lot of us if we ever had a meeting without him again. Eventually I got fired for subscribing to a mailing list with my personal email account (the mailing list was [the company]sucks@whateverhostitwas.com; I subscribed because our customers were so pissed off that they wouldn't even tell us what was wrong anymore, they just ranted on another mailing list, which eventually asked them to take it elsewhere. And I used my personal account because I didn't want it to appear that an employee of the company agreed with them. My boss and the CEO were both aware that I responded to and fixed complaints on the main mailing list, and approved of that, but when everything moved off to another list, suddenly it was treason to follow). By the way, a few weeks later, it was company policy that ALL employees had to be subscribed to that list.
Mostly I learned to avoid companies run by drug addicts from this experience. But I also learned to take a deep breath and a step back and at least ask what the hell someone was thinking before blowing up at them. Often, people have good intentions that get misinterpreted (or go the wrong way entirely), and just giving them a chance to explain what was going through their heads can be enough to resolve the situation peacefully. I also learned how to explain my own thought processes better, because sometimes I'm the one with the good intentions and poor follow-through. (When it comes to poor follow-through, baby, I'm the master!)
Job #3 I quit rather than got fired from, but I quit largely because I had had it with my boss. In March, I had asked for the weekend of the 4th of July off, explaining that not only was it my birthday weekend but that I had been invited up to Traverse City with a group, and hotel reservations had to be made. I was granted the time off, reservations were made, deposits were put down, etc. In a weekly staff meeting a few weeks before the trip, I reminded everyone that I still needed someone to take my Sunday shift, as it was a 24/7 center and I was the only one there on Sunday. My boss dressed me down in the meeting, saying that I was "inflexible" about my schedule. I waited until after the meeting and called John to ask how upset he would be if I quit, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon drafting my resignation letter, in which I detailed EVERY SINGLE SHIFT I had taken for others-- including working three days of the just-past Memorial Day weekend: I took a Friday shift (my day off, my schedule was Sun - Thurs), my own Sunday shift, and a 12-hour shift on Monday because only the midnight guy and I were even willing to consider coming in, so we split the day into a midnight-noon shift and a noon-midnight shift. I dropped my resignation off on my boss's desk as I left that day. He was actually surprised by it, because he was so out of touch with his employees that he had no idea that anyone ever had any beef with him at all.
Our time-off policy comes straight from my hatred of that job. I have yet to meet anyone who loves their job so much that they willingly give up their life outside of the job and enjoy doing so (I've met more than a few people who love the money from their job so much that they've allowed themselves to be forced into giving up their social life, which is not at all the same). Our policy stems from my inherent belief that a job should not take over your life. As long as there is at least some notice given (even "Hey, I won't be in tomorrow"... the general rule of thumb is "give at least as much notice as the time off will be", so that a two-week vacation should include two weeks of knowing about it beforehand) and the job responsibilities get done, I don't care about time off. The vacation policy is "don't make me count how many days you've taken", which pretty much means "try not to take two-week vacations two months in a row". If you'd rather work from home and there's no reason why you can't get as much done there as you get done in the office-- fine. Work from home. I like people to show up once a week so that I can have a staff meeting, but I really only manage to have them now and then, and if you miss one, *shrug*. Oh well. There will be another. (I do demand that people be available via IM or email if they're working from home, but that's about it.)
The fourth job I got fired from, I got fired largely because there was strife between the owners. One of them liked me a lot, and therefore the other desperately wanted to get rid of me. From this firing, I learned how not to dick around with an employee, because it was easily the worst firing I've ever had-- to the point that by the end of it I was so fed up that I said "Look, can I just go now?" First thing in the morning, I got a call from the owner that liked me, who sounded upset and said "I need to see you, but I'm busy right now, can you come up to my office in an hour?" Yeah, because THAT'S not going to set me on edge for the hour while I'm waiting. Sure thing. I had a pretty good idea of what was up, too. I killed time for an hour and then trotted up to his office, whereupon he told me that I was being let go, but that I could "work through the end of the week." Now, the idea of that is laughable to begin with, because even if I was inclined to do much in the way of useful work for the rest of the week, my ability to do so depended on having root passwords, and I knew damned well they would be changed before the hour was out. The person I worked with was an old friend of mine, and we went out to lunch after I got back down to the server room, during which he told me that the root passwords were changed while I was in my boss's office, because he knew that I was being fired-- the owners had offered him the management position he wanted if he would do the firing (he turned them down because he didn't think he could do it, and probably didn't agree with the reasons behind it to begin with-- I told him he should've done it anyway, as he probably would have done a better job of it, and at least one of us would get something out of it). Since they knew that we had been friends for years, I consider this particularly low of them. After we got back, I got a call from the HR manager, asking me to come up "in 45 minutes". Riiiiiiiiiight. She tried to get me to sign a letter saying that I was a "temporary" employee (meaning "not eligible for unemployment"), and then told me that the owner was wrong (!) about my being able to work through the end of the week, but that I could work through the end of the day. By this point, I was so pissed about the way everything had been handled, I snapped at her that I had carpet installers coming the next day (which was true) and that I'd just as soon go home right then so that I could prepare the room for them instead of wasting my time there.
The lesson in that? If you've decided to get rid of someone, just do it. Don't screw around, and don't string them along. Don't use it as political leverage against someone else, either, because even then I was far more annoyed at the way my friend/co-worker was treated than the way I was (I was *used* to being fired by that point; he wasn't used to being used as a pawn).
Job #4 was also the firing in which I stopped tolerating the idea that owners or executives inherently had more rights than other employees. I've always liked the idea of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself, and I highly doubt that any of the people involved in that clusterfuck would have liked to be on the other side of the table. Nowadays I extend that idea to company policy as well-- we have a very relaxed dress code in part because I want to be able to wear shorts and T-shirts to work all the time. My rule is that my employees are allowed to do anything that I'm allowed to do. (Which is another reason for a lax time-off policy, because I'm in favor of the "I don't want to come in today" days off too.) Things that aren't reasonable to have everyone doing are still on an open-book policy, though-- they might not be allowed to write checks, but if any one of them wishes to see the accounting and get a feel for how we spend our money, I'm fine with showing them where every single penny goes and why it goes there, and that includes showing them my salary and John's.
